It's Friday. It's the 13th. What could go wrong?
UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY: The Dead Drop has been warning you to brace yourself for an onslaught of documentaries, news stories, OP-EDs, panel discussions and the like marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The latest contribution to that genre that we have spotted comes from Newsweek which says it is running a series of articles “reconstructing the road to 9/11 as it was constructed 20 years ago, day by day.” They say they will be running daily stories and live tweeting events of the day, minute by minute, starting at 4:45a EST on September 11th. The series is written by author William Arkin. We haven’t gone through them line-by-line but in the first installment, Arkin says he will be pointing out “panicked overreactions and compounding of errors.” We quickly found some errors in his reporting. For example, in the first paragraph of a story posted on August 6th – designed to commemorate the now-famous August 6th PDB titled “Bin Ladin determined to strike in US,” Arkin says that CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin had drawn the short straw and had the duty of going to Crawford, Texas and briefing President George W. Bush. This came as news to us – and to McLaughlin. Michael Morell, who was Bush’s PDB briefer at the time explains at length in his book The Great War of Our Time, how that PDB item came to be written and delivered. He writes that the briefing took place in the living room of the president’s ranch and that he delivered it with only one other person besides himself present, Steve Biegun, the executive secretary of the NSC. Who drew the “short straw” is not really that important – but it makes us wonder if Newsweek gets those details wrong – how much stock should we put in the rest of the series? After all, they have had twenty years to work on it. (Note: Newsweek also changed the original CIA preferred spelling on the PDF of “Bin Ladin” to “Bin Laden” but we’ll forgive them for that.)
HAPPY? ANNIVERSARY: Well, we would not have picked the 9/11 anniversary as a likely candidate for an evening of fun – but we see that a “star-studded comedy event” is being planned for September 12 at Madison Square Garden. Comedians Jon Stewart and Pete Davidson have signed up to host the event. In a joint statement, they said: “We wanted to put on a fun celebration to honor this great city’s resilience. It’s nice to be able to do this with friends and people we love.” Davidson’s father was a New York City firefighter who died on 9/11 and Stewart has been an outspoken advocate for 9/11 first responders fighting to make sure they receive compensation for the health challenges that billowed forth from the ashes of that tragic day. In addition to the hosts – a passel of other comedians have signed up for the event including Amy Schumer, Bill Burr, Colin Jost, Colin Quinn, Dave Attell, Dave Chappelle, Jay Pharoah, Jimmy Fallon, John Mulaney, Michael Che, Ronny Chieng, Tom Segura, and Wanda Sykes.
THE GIFTS THAT KEEP ON GOING: Last week, we mentioned that $5,800 of booze that Japan had gifted to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo consumed a lot of attention by going missing. Now, we hear that misplacing presents is not uncommon. The State Department’s IG is conducting an investigation into the loss of 20 “types” of items from the Foggy Bottom gift locker where they store past presents. We are not sure exactly what “types” means – other than they are not just saying a score of gifts have gone walkabout – but rather that whole categories have disappeared. Hmm. Wonder if bourbon, rye, gin, and vodka would count as different ‘types’.
THE AD THAT CONTINUES TO KICK BUTT: In The Dead Drop a couple weeks ago, we mentioned a new recruitment ad featuring USAF Chief of Staff Charles “C.Q.” Brown looking into the camera and saying "When I'm flying, I put my helmet on, my visor down, my mask up," Brown adds: "You don't know who I am — whether I'm African American, Asian American, Hispanic, white, male or female. You just know I'm an American airman, kicking your butt. I'm General C.Q. Brown Jr. Come join us." Military.com is now telling the story of how the ad came about. Apparently, the lines are something Brown has been saying for a while in speeches and when a Madison Avenue executive handling the USAF account heard it, he recognized advertising gold.
BOOK REPORT: In our continuing effort to keep our readers apprised of upcoming books of potential interest – here are a couple book deals we just heard about. In the non-fiction category, Lauren Kay Johnson has signed up with MilSpeak Books to write “The Fine Art of Camouflage,” said to be a coming-of-age narrative exploring the author's yearlong deployment as an Air Force IO/PAO in Afghanistan, and the aftermath of post-traumatic stress upon her return to the States. Look for it in the spring of 2023. In the fiction section, author Kelly Sokol has landed a deal for “Breach” which the publisher describes as delving into the “incendiary marriage of a young Navy wife Navy wife and her explosive ordnance disposal officer husband. (We see what they did there with the “incendiary.”) Koehler Books plans to publish it in May 2022.
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? In the early 1960s, the U.S. military decided to try out portable nuclear power generators. Apparently, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Salon.com says one of the first operational uses of the device was about 800 miles from the North Pole in a tunnel 40 feet beneath the Greenland ice sheet. The Army operated it until it malfunctioned and started massively melting ice, decades before global warming became (un)popular. At the other end of the world, (geographically speaking,) the Navy had a device in Antarctica, allegedly nicknamed “Nukey Poo,” which had 438 malfunctions in 10 years. Apparently, the devices were not solely used for heating water in cold environs. We heard about another small reactor plant at Fort Belvoir, VA about twelve miles from the White House. That unit is still there. It cost about $2 million to build and is expected eventually cost $68 million to clean up. It hasn’t worked since 1973. What could go wrong?
GUARDIANS GUARD AGAINST BEING GOOFED ON: The U.S. Space Force is ready to take on all kinds of new missions – well, all kinds except the one tracking and investigating what used to be called UFOs. But, according to Politico, the Space Force is reluctant to look into these threats possibly from space (now known as “unidentified aerial phenomena”) because people might think they are ‘silly’. Sounds like a failure of imagination to us.
WE PROMISE NOT TO GOOF ON YOU…IF YOU SEND US TIPS GOOFING ON OTHER FOLKS IN THE NATIONAL SECURITY WORLD: Send your hints to TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com.
